Category: Catholic Church

SAID THE BISHOPS TO THE PRESIDENT: DO AS WE SAY OR NO COMMUNION

Bless the bishops, Father, for they have sinned.

A substantial majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted last week to initiate a process that could force President Biden to either alter his position on abortion, or never be allowed to take Communion again.  It’s a new spin on the old stick-up trope of “Your money or your life.” The operative dichotomy here is: “Your politics or your faith.”

You’d think the hierarchy of American Catholicism would be enthralled with having the first Catholic president in 60 years – only the second in the country’s history.  But come now the bishops with a theological ransom scheme designed to extort the White House. 

As a recovering Methodist, I mean no sacrilege.  Although I disagree with the Catholic position on abortion, I have always respected it as an understandable extension of the Church’s sanctity and dignity of life presumption, a principle it has applied to a panoply of social justice issues.  (See capital punishment, gun control, medical care, racial justice, income inequality and the just war theory.)

But these bishops have taken their anti-abortion advocacy to an utterly cruel and immoral level.  Catholics regard the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as the Church’s most important sacrament. According to its teaching, the bread and wine taken during Mass literally transforms into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To deny Communion to an observant Catholic is to deny the presence of Christ (here and here).

Although he has never worn his religion on his sleeve, Catholicism has long been an important part of Joe Biden’s life.  According to the Washington Post, he was taught by nuns in Catholic schools, seriously contemplated entering the priesthood, rarely misses Mass and clutches rosary beads when making major decisions. The bishops’ threat is built upon the leverage of Biden’s deeply held faith.  And that is why this extortion effort is so very wrong.

Without getting deeply into the weeds of Canon Law, the bishops going after Biden cite a provision that says Catholics cannot receive Communion if they are “conscious of grave sin.” That basically means knowingly and repeatedly engaging in a mortal sin without repentance. Since the Church views abortion as murder, the bishops argue that the president’s support for abortion rights is a disqualifying “grave sin.”  

Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have drafted numerous lists of acts rising to the mortal sin level.  Among the entries is extortion.  Threatening someone with an adverse action in order to achieve something of value is seen as a “grave sin.”   That’s why I wrote what I did in this piece’s first sentence. The bishops trying to extort the president of the United States are, themselves, committing a grave sin. 

Of course, grave sins are nothing new to many of the Church’s priests and bishops.  According to the Bishop Accountability Project, more than 7,000 American Catholic clerics have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 20,000 victims, most of them children.  For years, many bishops and other Church leaders were aware of the problem but covered it up, thereby allowing assaultive priests to continue offering Communion to their parishioners. Sins don’t get much graver than that.

Clearly, the bishops’ motive here has far less to do with the sanctity of the sacrament and far more to do with attempting to strongarm the president.  In their rhetoric, the bishops would have us believe that they would deny Communion to any political figure who supported either abortion or capital punishment.  Yet, none of them denied the Communion chalice to former Attorney General William Barr as he expanded the number of federal executions.  

My immediate visceral reaction to the bishops’ vote last week was directed at the raw meanness of it all.  Here’s Joe Biden, the person. At 78 he is actuarily in the twilight of his life, a life defined by his losses and his victories. He buried a wife and two children. His religion is deeply important to him. The hymns, the Bible verses, the prayers, the sacraments and all the other rituals come together as a tapestry that somehow sustains him, Joe the guy.  How dare men of power in this Church even think of ripping out major threads of that tapestry by converting the Sacrament of Holy Communion into a political weapon. 

This ugly predicament, however, offers up another consideration:  What if the bishops’ extortion plan worked?  What if the president, in order to be assured of access to Communion, pulled back all of his executive orders supporting a woman’s right to choose, and made it clear that, from this point forward, his administration would do everything possible to make abortion illegal?  Never mind the fact that 60 percent of the country – and 57 percent of Catholics – support abortion rights.  The result of such a power play is almost unthinkable: a bunch of men with “bishop” in their title would have commandeered the presidency of the United States.

Fortunately, that’s only a hypothetical, and one very unlikely to ever surface.  Biden would never cave to this extortion attempt. Asked about the threat last week, he told a reporter, “It’s a private matter, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”  The leaders of the two dioceses where he worships most frequently, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, have made it clear they have no intention of keeping Biden away from Communion in their jurisdictions. Yet, the mere fact that a sizeable group of Catholic leaders in this country have come this far in their threat to force the president’s hand on one of the most volatile issues of the day is, to say the least, cause for great alarm.  

It is very possible – even likely – that the U.S. Supreme Court will one day drive the final nail into the coffin of Roe v. Wade. As sad as that would be for a majority of Americans, it would nevertheless be in accordance with our democratic, three-branch system of government.  A similar result coming from a takeover of the Executive Branch by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops would be more than catastrophic.

It would be a grave sin.

FORGET GOOD AND BAD, WE’RE ALL PACKAGE DEALS

A week of eulogies and retrospectives on the life of John McCain gave us a long-overdue lesson on how to evaluate our leaders. What we saw, with apologies to Charles Dickens, was a Tale of Two Senators. John McCain was our best of times, and our worst of times. He represented the age of wisdom, and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, and the epoch of incredulity. His was the season of Light, and the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair.

In less Dickensian prose, the late Arizona senator was, like all of us, a package deal, a complicated amalgam of good and bad, of decency and chicanery, of success and failure. He was a man of honor and principle. He was also a man of political expediency. He had moments of greatness and moments of shame.

Death has a way of triggering a contemplative introspection in the living. It’s an opportunity to hold a mirror to our lives and thought processes, with an eye toward making necessary adjustments. An adjustment is precisely what we need right now. We are living in a pathologically polarized moment, right smack in the middle of a highly charged civil war of deeply held values. It’s us against them, and we’re playing for keeps. As many noted psychologists (here and here) have observed, that kind of tribalism gives way to rigid, binary thinking. We see people as good or bad, either with us or against us. It’s a deeply skewed and destructive perception. To build and sustain the kind of political movement that can take us to a better place, we need to look beyond what we want to see in order to know what is really there.

Minutes after McCain died, my Facebook feed was filled with reactions. He was described with words like: honorable, brave, decent, compassionate and honest. He was praised for being against discrimination and reasonable on immigration Within an hour, the rebuttals appeared. They were from those who came to bury the senator, not to praise him. Their counterpoints? McCain cheated on his first wife, was deeply involved in an influence peddling scandal, opposed to making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, cast a deciding vote upholding a presidential veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act, and referred to his North Vietnamese captors as “gooks”.

What appeared as two factions fighting over an epitaph was an illusion. They were both right. John McCain was good and bad. Or, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “. . . nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And “thinking” can be distorted by passionately held beliefs that filter people and events so that we see what we want to see.

McCain was the posterchild of the package deal approach to evaluating people. More than any of his contemporaries, he both owned his mistakes and had no problem abandoning fealty to partisan dogma when it suited his purposes. His death – as well as our reaction to it – offers a reminder that binary, black-or-white, either-or thinking, as tempting as it might be, is not a helpful way of understanding our world. Our desire to label people as heroes and villains, although understandable, is a fool’s errand.

Take Pope Francis, for example. Until last week, even I, as a recovering Methodist, was ready to nominate him for sainthood. “Who am I to judge”, he said of the Church’s position on gays. He focused on problems like poverty, climate change and corporate wrongdoing with an abiding intensity. He advocated for women’s equality and expressed an openness to allowing priests to marry. Then came the seemingly credible accusation that Francis had covered up a cardinal’s history of sexual abuse and pedophilia, triggering calls for his resignation. Do we move him from the good column into the bad? No. The amazing gifts this pope brought to his believers – and the rest of us – coexist with his human fallibility, one that may well have succumbed to a malignancy that seems to have permeated the culture of his church’s hierarchy. It’s a package deal. It’s important to see the entire package.

Every historical figure we’ve ever placed on a pedestal is a mere Google search removed from their warts. Mother Teresa, who became a saint last year, was accused of gross mismanagement and providing negligent medical care. Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. Mohandas Gandhi is said to have been openly racist toward blacks in South Africa and frequently shared a bed with his 17-year-old great-niece. The great emancipator himself, Abe Lincoln, was responsible for the country’s largest mass execution. In 1862, he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux tribal members in Minnesota. Package deals, all of them.

The moral of this story is that we need to look at the whole package, and see all of its parts, in order to have anything close to an accurate understanding. The alternative is what organizational communication experts call a “frozen evaluation”. That means we lock in our assessment of someone – or something – and see only that which is consistent with our frozen evaluation. To ignore the fact that we are all complicated works-in-progress is to miss opportunities for meaningful, constructive connection.

Our current toxic environment of dark, deeply divided and angry discourse will not last forever. The McCain memorials laid bare our longing for harmony, or at least decency, in our politics. Our behavior can take us there. We can begin that journey by not writing everybody off who disagrees with us. As the late senator said in his farewell letter, “We weaken (America’s greatness) when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down. . .” There are many kinds of walls, including the ones we build around others who don’t share our views. To escape our current quagmire, we need to replace those walls with bridges. We will not reach everyone, but somewhere in all those package deals out there lies an opportunity to connect. Real change will not happen until we seize that opportunity.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL REVISITED

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.

LONG OVERDUE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF ITS PRIESTS

I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.

In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.

That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.

Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.

As I read the story, I couldn’t figure out what the controversy was about. The bill struck me as one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie issues that should have unanimous support. Yet, until this year, the measure couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Ten inches into the story, the mystery was solved: “Wilson’s bill had been strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.” It passed this time with the Church’s blessing, only after Wilson amended it so that it would not apply to prior victims. The new law extends the age limit for filing child molestation suits from 25 to 38 only for those going forward. The Church managed to block all of its past victims from filing suit.

Christians will spend this coming week celebrating the resurrection of their savior, the original advocate for restorative justice, a preacher who told his followers to be peacemakers and reconcilers in order to transform brokenness and effect healing. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders are expending political capital to deny victims of its despicable sexual assault debacle access to the only forum that offers even a modicum of healing. Like it did in the beginning, and has ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been anything but Christ-like when it comes to the thousands of children raped and assaulted by its priests.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t paid a price for its sins. According to one estimate, the scandal has cost U.S. Catholics nearly $4 billion. Bankruptcy has been declared in 13 dioceses. Some of the largest losses came in states that lifted, at least temporarily, the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits. That’s why the Church is trying to block further litigation by spending millions of dollars on legislative lobbying in heavily Catholic states like New York and Pennsylvania. From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand the desire to stop the bleeding. Clearly, barricading the courthouse door in order to turn off the spigot of compensatory and punitive damages helps the Church’s bottom line. But for a religious organization in the business of absolution, the strategy is far more Machiavellian than Christian.

Granted, tort law is not a perfect venue for closure. But, thanks to the Church’s earlier choices, it is the only place offering Catholic molestation victims a shot at justice. In the early 1980s, when the tip of the scandalous iceberg was first noticed, a group of priests, led by Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, drafted a manual for dealing with the problem. It called for immediate ministering to the victims, paying for their therapy and counseling, rooting out the offending priests and the bishops who covered for them, all as a way of saying this should never happen again. Their proposal was rejected by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. The Church thought it would be better off taking its chances with the courts and confidential settlement agreements. Billions of dollars later, it learned how foolish that decision was. As Fr. Doyle told the National Catholic Reporter, “The civil law arena has been the only path whereby victims and survivors could pursue justice with hope of success because the courts and the American legal world represent a power that cannot be controlled or compromised by the institutional church.”

Thousands of broken men and women, sexually assaulted by priests during their childhood, have carried their tortuous psychic and emotional wounds into old age. The courts are their only chance of being heard and at least partially healed. That could cost the Church another billion, a heavy cross to bear. Then again, it is worth noting, particularly during Holy Week, bearing a heavy cross is not foreign territory to Christians.